[Note: in the version of this story posted on Tumblr, there were a
couple of font tricks I can't really replicate in this version. The
Archondroids used monospace font, while Glendalf's spell was written in
Lucille and colored pink.]

X.

Beneath the sign adorned by a heraldic image of (naturally) a red lion,
she saw another that said: GOOD LODGING FOR TRAVELERS. "I... think I
remember this now," she said.

"I think I might too," said Glendalf. "Shall we go?"

"Sounds good to me," said Jenny, and opened the door.

She was struck by the smell of delicious food, the sound of laughter and
arguments. The place was a true dive, but it had life and joy in it that
immediately lifted their weary spirits.

There were many inns and restaurants that called themselves the Red
Lion, but there was only one true Red Lion Inn. The Red Lion Inn was one
of the great disreputable interstitial bars and taverns of the
hypercosmos, shifting its location across time and space to avoid the
attention of the powers that be such as ARCHONET. A maze of hidden
tunnels and exits in the basement led to many dimensions. Here came
heroes seeking quests, criminals on the run from the law, queer people
seeking hookups, and anyone looking for a place to stay. The Bartender
had set the rule that anyone could stay at the Inn for free as long as
they needed, and in return she could call in one favor from them at any
time in their life.

XI.

The bouncer, was an enormous alligator-man who wore sunglasses, jeans
and a pink crop-topped tshirt of a simply drawn Sanrio alligator with
"BIG CHALLENGES" written on it. "Jenny!" he shouted. "What brings ya
around these parts?" He spoke in a wildly exaggerated, cartoonish
old-timey Brooklyn accent.

"Just the usual, Lockjaw. Got caught up in an Adventure and now I could
use a break." The alligator-man ushered them into the bar and Jenny
staggered in bar, supporting Glendalf on her shoulder. They took a seat
before the bar.

Looking around the bar, she saw a huge variety of people--cyborg
soldiers and supermen, elves and orcs, witches and detectives, gods and
demons, and some who just looked like regular people and may even have been.

She saw Anansi chatting up Osiris in the corner. Tieresias was having an
elaborate discussion about magic and transness with Morgan Le Fay. The
Whore of Babylon was advertising her services to Irene Adler. Achilles
was having an arm-wrestling match with Gilgamesh, and Loki was taking bets.

"Y'know," said a husky voice from beside Jenny, "I heard Achilles was
getting into pro wrestling. But he quit."

"Why?" said Jenny.

"Because they wanted him to do a heel turn."

"Ow!" said Jenny. "Why are you like this?"

"You've made worse puns, believe me," said the Bartender.

XII.

Jenny looked up and met the blue eyes of the woman with glossy auburn
hair, who stood tall in a plaid shirt and jeans. Her biceps were adorned
with tattoos of the various divine and demonic powers she'd made pacts with.

"Hi, Mary," said Jenny.

"Hiya, Jenny. So are you just stopping in to stop in or are you looking
for anything?"

"Well first of all," said Jenny, "I'll have a raspberry beer, and a
mimosa for my friend here." She indicated Glendalf, slumped on the bar
and resting his chin on his hands.

"Looks like he's already three sheets to the wind," said the Bartender.

"Things are bad out there."

"They sure are. Does he have a problem?"

"The Wild Hunt's on his tail."

"Shit," said the Bartender. "He shouldn't be here. He's a marked man.
Nothing I can do for him. Your man's a Jonah."

"Well, I'm not staying here without him," said Jenny. She crossed her arms.

The Bartender looked him over carefully as she mixed the drinks. She
could no longer tranform or take the power of the gods, but she still
had the Wisdom of Solomon.

"I can't help him," she said. "But maybe someone else here can."

XIII.

Amid all the different patrons of the bar, Jenny saw a figure sitting at
a table alone, hunched down and staring into her drink.

"Be careful around that one," said the Bartender. "She's trouble. Got
into a fight with Skadi last week. It was ugly. Damn near wrecked the
whole bar."

"I know her," said Jenny.

The woman was tall, muscular, her majestic silver hair raked up into an
enormous ponytail. As was so often the case, she wore an outfit that
left little to the imagination, in this case cut-off jean shorts and a
ripped t-shirt that just said "TRANS RAGE." On her forehead she bore a
tattoo of a red star. Even here and now, she radiated strength and
power. She was beautiful in the way a mountain was beautiful.

She was Octobriana.

XIV.

Octobriana. Sometimes known as Nadezhda Pacenikov, the Spirit of the
October Revolution, hero of the Soviet Union. Some said she came from an
utopian Communist civilization in the far future to help guide us there.
Some said was the daughter of a family of godlike beings that ruled an
ancient empire, but was cast out when she turned against them and slew
her own kin. Some said she was manifested psychically from the will of
the proletariat itself. All these things were probably true somewhere.

Exiled from the country she loved when the reigns of power changed
hands, she wandered the world fighting oppressors and exploiters of all
kinds, the anti-James Bond. Some called her a terrorist. Some called her
a liberator. Jenny called her a friend.

XV.

Jenny sat down on the table by Octobriana, who didn't notice at first.
She slouched down with her elbow on the table and rested her face on her
palm. "Hi Nadia," she said. There were few who had earned the right to
call her that name.

Octobriana blinked, slowly surfacing from the deep sea she had been lost
in. "...Jenny?" she said.

"Yep! That sure is me."

"I... God, I thought I'd never see you again." Octobriana's eyes were
filled with longing and loneliness. "This doesn't feel real, seeing you
again," she said. "Nothing feels real anymore. Sometimes I fear I am
still in the Tower of Zirma, tormented by visions of what was and what
can never be."

"Well, it's real, and I'm here." Jenny smiled at her. She reached out to
touch her hand, but Octobriana quickly pulled it back.

XVI.

"Octobriana! Fancy meeting you here," said Glendalf, restored by the
revivifying influence of the mimosa. He pulled up a chair beside them.

"Glendalf? You're here too?" said Octobriana. "Now there's another face
I never expected to see again."

"I have a way of cropping up where I'm never expected, you know," said
Glendalf. Octobriana laughed a little bit, and seemed more at ease; that
was such a characteristic thing for him to say that he had to be real.

Jenny, Glendalf and Octobriana had once been teammates in the League of
Liberation, a branch of the Sixth International. A secret organization
that battled evil and oppression all over the world. It had been formed
to fight the Sixth Column, a cult that worshipped the fascist space god
Stardust the Super-Wizard. The League of Liberation was the Sixth
International's frontline cadre of seasoned adventurers and
super-champions: the Magician from Mars, Butterfly, Ace Harlem,
Trashman, Madam Fatal and many more. Throughout the 1960s, the Sixth
International had grown in power and strength, but by the end of the
1970s it was all but gone. Occasional attempts to start a Seventh
International had largely gone nowhere.

XVII.

"It's good we found you," said Glendalf. "You see, Jenny and I both need
help--"

"I hope you're not trying to drag me off on some adventure," said
Octobriana. "I told you, I'm done with that."

"OK," said Jenny. "Do you just want to sit here, stare into your drink
and do nothing for the rest of your life?"

"Yes," said Octobriana.

Jenny sighed. "Look. I know that--I know things are hard, with the way
it all ended. I know we all blamed ourselves for, that, and it's hard to
get over--"

"Trashman," said Glendalf.

They all looked at each other and said nothing. "He was a deeply
frustrating man," said Glendalf after a while. "It was a shame a man
with so much leather had to be so desperately heterosexual. And yet--"
He sighed.

"Sometimes I still have dreams about his death."

XVIII.

In 1968, the team had finally defeated Stardust the Super-Wizard, but
Trashman had lost his life in the battle. He'd been hard to work with
sometimes, and Jenny, Glendalf and Octobriana had all frequently gotten
into arguments with him. But he'd been the true believer in the Sixth
International's cause. When he'd died, it was the beginning of the end.
Without his motivating energy, and with the original enemy the team was
formed to fight now gone, they'd lost their sense of purpose and drifted
apart, going the way of the Companions of the Black Star before them.

I'd intended to explain the history of the different public domain/open
source characters I'm using here a little more fully in the endnotes,
but this part of the story might require a little more
contextualization. So, an explanation for some of the more important
characters involved in this chapter:

Octobriana was a character created by Petr Sadecky, a Czech comics
writer/hoaxer who defected to West Germany during the Cold War. He
repurposed a character he'd come up with called Amazona as Octobriana,
the embodiment of the ideals of the Russian revolution. n his book
Octobriana and the Russian Underground, came up with an elaborate
mythology around her where she was the creation of the dissident
Communist organization Progressive Political Pornography, or PPP, who
made underground comics about her.

The story captured the imagination of the 70s counterculture; David
Bowie mentioned Octobriana and the Russian Underground as one of his
favorite books and Billy Idol had an Octobriana tattoo. Because she was
supposed to be the creation of an underground Communist organization,
she wasn't under copyright and appeared in a number of British comic,
notably Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Her existence
was part of the inspiration for creating Jenny Everywhere.

Trashman was an underground comics superhero created by American
underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez who in a 1968 series of comic
strips in the influential counterculture alt-weekly the East Village
Other (which didn't have a proper copyright notice and was thus public
domain due to copyright law of the time). Trashman was the defender of
the working classes against a fascist government in a dystopian future,
who fought for the secret anarcho-Marxist organization the Sixth
International using their "para-sciences."

The Magician from Mars is a character created by John Giunta and Malcolm
Kildale who appeared in 1939's Amazing-Man comics, published by Centaur,
who gave the world a lot of oddball early heroes like the Fantom of the
Fair, Speed Centaur, the Eye (who is an actual floating eye, and
inspiration for my LNH20 character Private Eye) and so on. In her
original origin she was Jane GEM-35, daughter of a human and a Martian
who was given superpowers by a cathode ray that made her practically
omnipotent. Her enemies included an extradimensional demon elemental
which she banished with the power of music and the Hood, a crime lord
who was secretly her aunt. I threw her in here becuase her name and
concept kind of evokes 70s glam-rock sci-fi mythology.

People here presumably know who Stardust the Super-Wizard is because of
Wil Alambre's excellent The Super-Wizard from Space.

Lockjaw the Alligator was a funny-animal character crated by Joe Simon
and Jack Kirby in 1947's Punch and Judy Comics. I am one of the maybe 10
people who remembers he existed. I put him in because I wanted there to
be a Kirby character in this story.

Mary is a character whose early adventures are in the public domain but
who I won't fully name here because of the long series of lawsuits
around characters related to her.

Jeanne Morningstar

Interestingly, there was an Octobriana comic that hit shelves a week or
two ago (dunno if it was reprints or new adventures). I learned about
Octobriana through the Cherry comics in the 90s.

Dave Van Domelen, recalls the unibrow....

On 1/7/22 11:53 AM, Dave Van Domelen wrote:
> Interestingly, there was an Octobriana comic that hit shelves a week or
> two ago (dunno if it was reprints or new adventures). I learned about
> Octobriana through the Cherry comics in the 90s.
>
> Dave Van Domelen, recalls the unibrow....
I've vaguely heard of this--it turns out last year was the 50th
anniversary of the character, so there were a couple different
commemorative projects. I had no idea this was the case when I threw the
character in.

Jeanne Morningstar

On 2022-01-07 09:53, Dave Van Domelen wrote:
> Interestingly, there was an Octobriana comic that hit shelves a week or
> two ago (dunno if it was reprints or new adventures). I learned about
> Octobriana through the Cherry comics in the 90s.
>
> Dave Van Domelen, recalls the unibrow....

Unibrow on Octobriana, I don't recall. But then I only read the Cherry
comic. I have the relevant one within arm's reach right now, 'cause I
went to the archives in the next room over and did my research. 8{D>

The other characters sound interesting. I didn't do my research on
Stardust the Super Wizard, but I doubt any hero of his era would *try*
to be fascist, but I also understand why Octobriana might treat him as one.

And it is impressive that you found all those characters and wrote a
story about them. Nowadays I can't even finish coloring a Powernaut
comic, albeit double-sized. 8{C>

--
-- (signed) Scott Eiler 8{D> ------ http://www.eilertech.com/ -------

"Your Royal Highness, instead of devoting yourself exclusively
to Minerva, should, instead, rather offer sacrifice at the altars
of Bacchus, Orpheus, Venus, and Morpheus."

- Advice to Prince Duarte of Portugal. From "The golden age of
Prince Henry the Navigator", by Joaquim Pedro Oliveira Martins.
Coming soon to Project Gutenberg.